Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 037 - Flow of Funds

June 9, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Source: https://twitter.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1738221896234373387 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 037: Flow of Funds We explain how payments will work in OpenA... Upload date: 20231222 Transcription model: mlx-whisper/mlx-community/whisper-tiny Generated at: 2026-06-01T20:29:14Z

Machine-generated transcript. Review speaker labels and wording before using this as quote-grade source material.

[00:00] Christopher David: Let's talk about how the flow of money will work on open agents.

[00:07] Christopher David: This is a Wiki document that will stay updated.

[00:11] Christopher David: It may change over time, but well, you'd at least see how we're thinking about things.

[00:16] Christopher David: So the objectives here, we really want to pay Bitcoin to as many people as possible as much as possible as fast as possible with the easiest user experience.

[00:29] Christopher David: And on the buy side of this, we want to make it as easy as possible for end users to pay for each and usage.

[00:36] Christopher David: Who is paying either individual users who are paying for age and usage via our self-served platform at open agents.com, connect to credit card, etc.

[00:47] Christopher David: Or companies that are buying agent usage in bulk.

[00:52] Christopher David: We'll do more enterprise focused stuff later on.

[00:57] Christopher David: And then we want who is getting paid for this contributors.

[01:01] Christopher David: Whether you are a computer provider, this is what we have had focused on to this point with the GPU toopia GPU sellers.

[01:08] Christopher David: But also model authors, data providers and curators, algorithm offers, app developers, refers educators.

[01:17] Christopher David: We want everyone getting these value for value revenue splits in Bitcoin lightning.

[01:24] Christopher David: So how payments are made are users maintain a balance and can top up with Bitcoin lightning or credit card.

[01:31] Christopher David: We're going to be kind of modeling this flow off of voltage.

[01:34] Christopher David: They've got a pretty good flow here.

[01:37] Christopher David: You add credit in Bitcoin or lightning or credit card via stripe.

[01:43] Christopher David: That's pretty cool.

[01:50] Christopher David: Contributors when you are in sats, it gets added to your balance.

[01:54] Christopher David: Conceivably there may be another flow where people are commenting directly.

[01:59] Christopher David: There's L402 things we're still thinking through about how best to integrate with that and how that might affect this model.

[02:06] Christopher David: Maybe as an alternative, but this will be sort of the primary flow is contributors are in sats, you add your balance.

[02:11] Christopher David: And then you can withdraw your balance via Bitcoin or lightning.

[02:15] Christopher David: Then how the payments are split?

[02:17] Christopher David: Every agent can have its own revenue split.

[02:20] Christopher David: It can vary by agent.

[02:22] Christopher David: Any part of an agent module see the last video for explanation of the agent modules.

[02:30] Christopher David: They have an associated cost that is paid to one or more contributors.

[02:35] Christopher David: And here's one example.

[02:37] Christopher David: Alice adds, resolve GitHub pull requests to the agent skills database.

[02:43] Christopher David: The skill uses a specific chain of calls to APIs, large language models and vector databases.

[02:50] Christopher David: Bob configures his auto dev agent to use that skill.

[02:54] Christopher David: Connecting it to his GitHub repo.

[02:56] Christopher David: He pays 12,000 sats about $5 US to run the agent job.

[03:02] Christopher David: Alice earns 2,000 sats to her balance because she assembled the skill.

[03:07] Christopher David: Carol earns 1,000 sats for providing compute for the vector settings and open model calls via her worker be client.

[03:14] Christopher David: Dave earns 500 sats because his API key was used for the one called the GPT4.

[03:20] Christopher David: Eve earns 120 sats because she referred Alice to sign up months ago.

[03:25] Christopher David: Frank earns 120 sats because he referred Bob to sign up yesterday.

[03:30] Christopher David: Grace earns 300 sats because her fine-tune model was used in the skill flow.

[03:35] Christopher David: Open agents keeps the rest because we're a business and want to grow our Bitcoin stack too.

[03:42] Christopher David: The specific percentages of these and what we take and blah blah blah like that will change.

[03:49] Christopher David: This is just kind of me spitballing a bit.

[03:53] Christopher David: But people will be able to set their own prices.

[03:58] Christopher David: Yeah, we want this to be basically a complete free market.

[04:04] Christopher David: There will be some limitations largely around the fiat side of things because we have to consider charge back risk.

[04:11] Christopher David: So the top ups of credit cards may require additional verification.

[04:17] Christopher David: You cannot withdraw things that you top up with credit card via Bitcoin Lining.

[04:23] Christopher David: That's just kind of a nightmare for us.

[04:25] Christopher David: And we're not going to refine them because I don't want to.

[04:28] Christopher David: And then there will probably be some kind of compliance stuff that we have to care about.

[04:33] Christopher David: OFAC and that kind of thing.

[04:35] Christopher David: We are a US based company.

[04:38] Christopher David: There will be stuff that we may need to do.

[04:41] Christopher David: But hey, you can fork off if you don't want to deal with that.

[04:47] Christopher David: Transparency.

[04:48] Christopher David: All of the payment code will remain open source in this repo.

[04:51] Christopher David: Open agents.

[04:52] Christopher David: And we will be listing an anonymized or aggregate payment.

[04:57] Christopher David: On a public accounting dashboard, they will be at open agents.com slash accounting or something like that.

[05:05] Christopher David: Yeah, so that's how we're thinking about things.

[05:09] Christopher David: And want to get kind of a basic implementation of some of the wallet management and account top up and some demo payout stuff working in the next few days.

[05:23] Christopher David: Maybe we can send out some Bitcoin Sats as Christmas presents.

[05:29] Christopher David: See you later.